Bless me father, for I have sinned… So began the Catholic sacrament of confession as I remember it from thirty years ago, having made my ‘first confession’ at the Church of St Hugh’s, Buckden (Cambridgeshire) in the late 1970s. At least twice a year my siblings and I would wait uneasily in the pews at the back of church preparing for five minutes of toe-curling embarrassment with one of the parish priests as we stumbled through our short list of pre-adolescent failings: disobedience, showing disrespect to our elders, laziness, lying, cheating, sometimes stealing.

It’s arguable how beneficial all this was for the juvenile mind, and perhaps that’s beside the present point. I was glad however when in the 1980s individual confession came to be replaced by services of ‘general absolution’. These meant you didn’t have to name your sins out loud, which was probably for the best as we passed through our teens. In truth, one-to-one confession wasn’t as bad as it sounds and was approached seriously in our family, albeit with a certain grim humour. The ‘confessional’ in 1950s-built St Hugh’s was nothing like the comedy baroque chambers you see in the films—it was more like a well-maintained public convenience. If you were lucky, it would be Father Rourke behind the curtain, who was rather deaf and whose gentle Irish accent was so impenetrable that you couldn’t be upset by his response. He would listen to your confession and then invite you to consider ‘crushing the head of the serpent’, sending you away to recite three Hail Marys or an Act of Contrition.

The challenge for us children was to come up with a sensible and credible list of sins, usually confined to the basics—non-controversial but without sounding as though you were reading from the same list every time. A story told by our grandmother warned us of the dangers of anything too outré—as a convent-girl in the 1920s she had confessed to adultery and it had caused a stir. Invited by her confessor to elaborate she explained that she had been seen wearing an under-vest in public and that, even worse, she had borrowed it without permission from another girl.

A brilliant solution was devised by our little sister in the form of a tiny, clandestine manuscript scarcely bigger than a communion wafer. It consisted of a few stapled pages on which were written, in minute script, a goodly range of childish sins. The manuscript could be concealed in the palm of the hand and served as a peccatorial aide-memoire once in the confessional; if you opened the pages at random, the laws of chance took care that sins would be rehearsed in a different sequence every time. For a consideration, our sister would lend it to her brothers, and so the little book would be passed along the pew and then put away, concealed in a sock drawer, until the next time. Bless me father, for I have sinned…

However, I realise we were not the first to come up with this solution. In fact, in the seventeenth-century cleric Christophe Leuterbreuver, had published a remarkable little pocket book along this line which became a bestseller, running to numerous editions. It was more than just a list though—being a fully-fledged livre à système incorporating hundreds of folding slips. I have now owned several copies of this book, the earliest being printed in 1695 the latest in 1751.

The book as a whole provides an uncommonly intimate view of the soul, akin to listing at the door of the confessional. The sins are set out according to the Ten Commandments and provide a glittering array of human failings. This is not a book for children and one wonders whether its popularity was as much because it provided such a panorama of the dark side of the soul. The list of sins for the ninth commandment, for example includes memoranda for ‘Avoir eu des pensées & des désirs lascifs. Y avoir eu de la délectation… Avoir prêté consentement aux illusions nocturnes… Avoit employé l’art magique des breuvages, & choses semblables, pour engager quelque personne en amour… Avoir dit des chansons lascives. Avoir dit les contes, & tenu des entretiens lascifs. Avoir fait des billets & écrits lascifs. Avoir eu, lû, & donné les Livres lascifs… Avoir jetté des regards déshonnêtes…’

My grandmother’s confessors might have blanched at the sight of it, but she herself would have been intrigued and perhaps just a little amused. And I hope Father Rourke will forgive me for writing this post.

This time last year, I had just returned from a visit to Scandinavia. In my bag was this tiny book, found on the shelves of a Copenhagen bookshop, where it was hidden in the triple-shelved books of the theology section, wedged beside the water pipes. I had recognised the binding as being in the style of the Guild of Women Binders, with its modelled goatskin covers. Though an old pencilled note in the front suggested that the cover depicted Pan with his flute, the image looked more like a Burne-Jones angel to me. The book itself is an unremarkable edition of the Imitatio Christi by Thomas a Kempis. The binding is dated 1896.

National Museums Liverpool

How long this angel had been in Denmark I just don’t know. Home in Faversham, a few minutes internet research brought up the source of the image: Edward Burne-Jones’s Angel playing a Flageolet, painted around 1878, now at Sudley House, Liverpool. Of course, it’s one of a veritable host of Burne-Jones angels: they were both his signature and his credo, brought to life in countless paintings, tapestries and stained-glass windows and endlessly reproduced. In 1882 Oscar Wilde recalled Burne-Jones telling him: ‘The more materialistic science becomes, the more angels I shall paint: their wings are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul’. He seems to have been particularly fond of this musical angel, keeping it in his studio for ten years before parting with it. How did our angel migrate to find itself on a bookbinding? The answer has been provided by Graham Hogg of the National Library of Scotland (who have acquired the book) and is written up on their website:

In short, Graham recognised the binding as a product of the late nineteenth-century Edinburgh school of bookbinding founded by Annie McDonald soon known as the Edinburgh Arts and Crafts Club. The work of McDonald and her followers (almost all women) is characterized by these moulded goatskin bindings, where the leather has been worked while wet, with a single tool, pushing and squeezing it into relief, with remarkable effect. When new, their bindings were probably much whiter, only mellowing with age. The Edinburgh group were important, since it was they who inspired the foundation of a larger national organization, The Guild of Women Binders, who made and exhibited many hundreds of innovative book bindings over the coming decades. Their work was very much in tune with the Arts and Crafts Movement, creating objects of beauty and utility which contrasted with increasingly mass produced goods. Women played an important part in this. In mass factory production it was often women who provided cheap deskilled labour of stultifying tedium; one of the aims of The Guild of Women Binders was to allow women to relearn and revive traditional skills in a creative environment.

The binding has been positively identified as the work of one ‘Miss Maclagan’, probably a pupil of Annie McDonald, who has carefully copied a detail of Burne-Jones’s original, probably from a photographic reproduction. Graham Hogg has also discovered that this very book was exhibited at the 1898 London exhibition of the Guild, where it was item 93 and exhibited as an example of the work of the Edinburgh School.

It is one of the great pleasures of bookselling to see books find appropriate homes. There can be no better home for this wonderful binding than the National Library of Scotland.

A few days ago I visited the ancient town of King’s Lynn. It was a memorable trip, not least for being booked-ended by glimpses of the great medieval cathedrals of Peterborough (underrated, I think) and Ely (the much-loved ‘Ship of the Fens’). Lynn, once one of the busiest sea-ports in Europe, had an eerie autumnal quietness; low clouds hung over the fenland approaches and the tide was disquietingly high in the Ouse estuary.

I spent some time in the borough archives, still housed in the Town Hall (access via the Old Gaol House). The medieval town archives of Lynn are breathtaking and include one of the finest collections of town charters in the country. But for me, the highlight was an initially unprepossessing paper book now blessed with the name of ‘The Red Register’ after its later binding. The register is a collection of town documents written up in this book from the year 1307. After turning some of its leaves and admiring the handwriting I put the register back in its archive box and made a brief note: ‘paper book; 1307; ?early’ and moved on.

In the early fourteenth century England’s writers habitually wrote, as we all know, with quill pens on sheets of parchment or vellum. And that’s true of writers in a variety of fields: in the church, the law courts, or in royal and local government. Here in Lynn, in 1307 we find a medieval writer (or probably writers) writing on quires of paper with the clear intention of binding them up as a book. The paper could not, of course, have been English: the first recorded English paper mill dates from only the 1490s, when a Hertford paper maker supplied paper to the printer William Caxton.

It was only after I returned home to Faversham (which coincidentally has a pretty mean collection of medieval charters) that I realised just how early the Lynn paper book was. In fact, consulting the endlessly-useful classic by Michael Clanchy From Memory to Written Record, I found that: ‘The earliest records made in England on paper come most appropriately from major seaports: a register from King’s Lynn beginning in 1307 and another from Lyme Regis in 1309’.

The King’s Lynn Red Register is then, the earliest surviving English paper book. I realise that, had I been paying attention, I would have noticed it even has its own blue plaque outside the town-hall, though it doesn’t tell us why it’s important.

It’s a common (and fair) assumption that paper books have something to do with printing. Books are printed on paper. There are a few black-tulip exceptions, usually very early (a few copies of the Gutenberg Bible and other incunables, including Caxtons, and of course a few copies of the wonderful Kelmscott Chaucer and other private press books; late revivals of vellum printing). There’s also a co-incidence of chronology: paper making, especially in England, takes off with the advent of printing. Conversely, we tend to think of medieval manuscripts as written on parchment or vellum.

On reflection I can now think of several examples of English medieval manuscripts on paper, mostly urban or legal registers from the fifteenth century (there’s even one here in Faversham). A few date from the period before printing, but very few from the fourteenth century. That makes the 1307 Red Register at Lynn truly remarkable.

It speaks of a confident leap-of-faith on behalf of the town government to make an important civic record on a material with such a short track-record in practice. Of course we know that Chinese and Islamic cultures used paper long before, but the first paper mills in Europe were not active before the 1270s (in Italy; where else?). Urban records were not mere shopping lists: they were the documents used by powerful ruling elites to protect the data which allowed them to carry out their day to day business in the knowledge that they were acting correctly and lawfully. Town documents were jealously guarded and treated with all the care and respect that a major business corporation would use to maintain and back-up its databases. That is one reason why medieval town records have such a good rate of survival.

To experiment with paper as a record-keeping technology was a brave and forward-looking move in 1307. Probably before its time, since it didn’t catch on for so long. Paper would turn out to have all kinds of advantages over parchment: it can be less bulky, it allows for much more rapid writing in new, faster hands, and ultimately it would become cheaper. By 1500, except for deeds and charters, paper would become dominant in record-keeping of all kinds. Perhaps most significantly, in the long run, it provided a perfect surface for printing.

I’m fascinated by the people who made medieval administrative records. It seems to me that, just like the IT wizards of the 21st century, it is they who were experimenting with new technologies for recording day-to-day experience. The Red Register of Lynn is perhaps just one example of how far ahead of their time they could be. They were often people of extraordinary capability and imagination. It’s no coincidence that people such as Geoffrey Chaucer, controller of customs at London, was also a full-time administrative writer. It has been argued that the explosion of English lay-literacy in the fourteenth century came about in part through advances in literate technology among administrators in the great towns of England. That is another story and one I’m certainly encouraged to revisit after my archival explorations at Lynn…

Last year, while recording with the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow I unpacked an old suitcase of papers belonging to the largely unknown Second World War poet Timothy Corsellis. Among the papers were notebooks containing over 100 unpublished poems, many on the subject of the war itself. I’m delighted to say that the poems have now been published, as part of a masterly biography by Helen Goethals.

The Unassuming Sky - Timothy Corsellis

Pilot Timothy Corsellis died at the controls of his plane when it crash-landed on October 10th 1941. He was not yet 21. The poems he left behind were recognised for their quality and importance, with a small number appearing in anthologies of war poets. He also receives a brief notice by Ronald Blythe in ODNB. In life he was recognised as a rising talent, and attracted the notice of contemporary poets, including Stephen Spender who he met and who penned a posthumous poem in tribute to him.

The story told by the 100 poems we found in the Roadshow suitcase was too complex to tell in all but the briefest details in a few minutes of screen time. Corsellis trained with the RAF as a fighter pilot as the Battle of Britain was being fought in the skies above Southern England. Like so many young men of his generation he wrestled with the morality of war. While fully convinced of the evils of the Nazi regime, Timothy’s deeply-held Christian values were challenged by the onset of war. He was initially an objector, then enrolled with RAF.

In 1940 Corsellis was assigned to bomber training; at which point he was hit, head-on, by the moral dilemma which would ultimately end his life. The dilemma is prescient, even in 2012, as debates over the ethics of bombing civilians in war are ever present, not least in the context of the memorial to the pilots of the Second World War’s Bomber Command, constructed only this year in London.

Corsellis requested a transfer to a fighter squadron or the Fleet Air Arm, where his targets would, at least, be military. His request was met with refusal and an honourable discharge from the RAF. As a relief worker in London’s East End he then observed the realities of civilian casualties during the Blitz; which he recorded in some of his best poems, such as ‘Dawn after the raid’. Having described the discovery of another body among the ruins, he asks:

Relief work in the London Blitz

‘Is it for this that bending we strived

And fought in each other’s blood and other’s sorrow

To reach these wretched mangled remains?

Is it for this that we ached in the darkness

Not knowing that nearby

Another house had fallen

To the blast of that same bomb.’

Like others of his best poems, it evokes the terrible realities of death in war and the fresh dilemmas facing the living at every turn. Corsellis tackled these questions bravely; always with a human background. This is one reason why his poetry remains so relevant today.The poet then saw service as a transport pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary (A.T.A.), delivering planes and supplies, and it was during a routine flight from Luton to Carlisle that his Miles Magister L8268 stalled, crashed, and ended his life.

The Unassuming Sky includes 100 poems presented within the framework of a sensitively researched biography by Helen Goethels, who was granted full access to the family’s papers and personal memoirs. Her study is alive with interconnections and influences which helped to shape the work of this important war poet.

The credit for bringing the poems to publication after more than 70 years goes in large part to the poet’s brother, John Corsellis. It was he who brought the suitcase to the Antiques Roadshow and who created such a memorable impression while discussing on camera what the artefact meant to him. It was the broadcast of this discussion which found the poems an agent and led to publication with the Cambridge Scholars Press.

Since my first post ‘to begin at the beginning…‘ on the firm of A. Maurice & Co, founded by my great-great-grandfather, I’ve been fortunate to receive lots of suggestions, corrections and facts from friends and family. I hope to incorporate these here and in future posts.

Most importantly Simon Hicks pointed out my confusion between the two Armands, father and son. Armand (born 1824) my great great-grandfather founded the firm of A. Maurice, but later in the century it was run from Bedford Street by his son Armand (born 1865) my great grandmother’s brother.

Shakespeare, First Folio, 1623

This week I have been pursuing a chance reference I found to the Shakespeare First Folio (1632) sold by A. Maurice & Co in August 1896. To my delight, the copy had been tracked down by Anthony James West shortly before publication of his Census in 2003 and appears there as West 213. The copy still exists and is in Japan – apparently having been the very first copy of the First Folio to arrive in Japan.

A. Maurice acquired it in the 1890s and quite quickly sold it to the Cornish tin magnate John Claude Daubuz. It was sold again in 1932 (Sotheby’s, 25 July, lot 129A) and bought by Marks for £100. The next we hear of it is when sold jointly in 1969 by the British firm H. M. Fletcher and Japanese firm Yushodo to a Mr Kamijo in 1969 for £6,400. Lee’s enquiries suggest the copy was still with the Kamijo family in Japan in 2001.